My One Night Stand with the Ghost of Bill Farrell

Whitenigahs

If a ghost is a manifestation of a restless spirit then I’d bet my last sonnet that Spennymoor Settlement is haunted by the ghost of Bill Farrell.

Toynbee Hall, earliest and most famous establishment of the Settlement Movement was inaugurated in 1883. The idea was simply that forward thinking men and women of talent, altruism and education should,

“…share themselves with their neighbours”

                                                Cannon Samuel Barnett 1883

As parts of the North East fell into the mire of mass unemployment, exacerbated by the 1926 general strike, a very special man found his way to S.W. Durham. That man was to do much more than share himself – he gave over the vast proportion of his energy, creativity, intellect and working life to a small industrial area called Spennymoor. William Farrell established a Settlement in April 1931 that exists today primarily in the guise of a modest amateur theatre but which gave birth to much of the artistic and creative brilliance which is recognised internationally as emanating from that era and area vis-à-vis the Pitman Painters.

With what we in poetry circles refer to as an ‘intimate’ audience, I found myself performing in that history-weighted venue wondering a little nervously what Mr Farrell might have made  of a mixed race woman entertaining with comedy performance poetry. Ever the innovator, broad minded and egalitarian, I can only surmise his welcome would have been warm and encouraging.

Certainly my father, had there been a Settlement to attend and a figure like Bill Farrell to encourage him, might have fared better in a world of rigid strata which was the post war, pre flower power England. Fourth son of a foundry man who suffered debilitating workplace injuries, my father was in many respects the epitome of a Whitenigah. Viewing him posthumously and with adult eyes, I no longer find it strange that a white working class boy, who may never have spoken to a black person, should fall for my mother – a black immigrant from the colonies – different from him in every conceivable way – even down to class and education. My mother was educated at a colonial girls’ school where only the King’s English was spoken. I suspect it may partly have been her otherness that drew him. If you feel rejected or an outsider in what is supposed to be your own community, isn’t it easier to be a genuine outsider in someone else’s? Though he had a couple of very close friends from his boyhood, my father was never happier than in the company of my step-grandfather who was from St Kits. He was completely content and at ease with my grandmother’s large social circle from Guyana, Trinidad, Tobago and Jamaica. He danced to Reggae, drank rum and ate black eye peas ‘n rice with fried chicken as if he too was a descendant of slaves.  At his request, his ashes were scattered over Kaieteur Falls.

Pivotal in his life was something which happened at a tender age. Despite passing the infamous 11+ exam with flying colours, he failed the nastier and less official social test. Having been denied a place at grammar school by his social betters, his natural intellect was forever frustrated. If only my father had met a Bill Farrell – someone who would have looked beyond his background and the state of his shoes.

Although from the intelligentsia, Bill Farrell motivated the Whitenigahs of S.W Durham and I was fortunate enough for one night to have my mug shot on a poster with Arnold Hadwin’s Settlement motif depicting the masks carved by the artist and sculptor Tisa Hess.

In its heyday, Spennymoor Settlement provided an educational and creative outlet for adults, developmental play for children and hope for the future. Looking through my local Adult Education leaflet recently, I noted that even if there had been a course I fancied there were none I could afford; depressingly there was also an obvious grammatical error on the first page.

I find it hard to believe if my father were alive today that he wouldn’t have benefited from a Settlement setup. Much that culture has to offer now seems derivative to the point of dizzying nausea and the most enduring thing the current education system is giving many youngsters is debt.

Mass Market Martyrs & Fast Food Fundamentalists

Surely you must have noticed it? I don’t mean the Joan of Arc type – she would have been sectioned not burnt these days – and who’s to say that wouldn’t have been a worse fate. I’m not talking about those other women either – the ones who should be put out of their misery – or ours. The ones who whine on about having to fetch and carry for a child or partner or other and get to do nothing for themselves (ok I admit I’ve complained that way once or twice or thrice). Frankly I wonder if the relative or neighbour or child wouldn’t welcome some good natured neglect in place of the pursed lips and the dutiful attention. But no, I’m talking about the new martyrs, women and sometimes men who daily and uncomplainingly martyr themselves to a cause so all-pervading you may be shocked that it has gone relatively undocumented.

Travelling home last Saturday night I observed some shoe martyrs. They have always existed but their sheer numbers and uniformity must now constitute a phenomenon and they are just one element of a very broad church.

The shoes required for this ritual suffering are so aesthetically hideous I feel it would be worse than a misnomer to simply label these people fashion victims. Fashion victim suggests some visual gain for the distressed wearer. Stacked, clumped, blocks of wedged, solid, cartoon shoes with heels, make the feet appear like stilted hooves. Also, they cause the wearer to walk like a cross between a giraffe and an elephant on a rope bridge. The shoe martyrs clearly belong to some mysterious sect much weirder and wider than anything imagined by Scientology. This cult, through collective pain, podiatric ugliness, broken ankles, damaged hips and tilted wombs, will eventually decrease the overall suffering of mankind. The shoe martyrs act regardless of age, shape or size. Some, in their zeal, go out in the modern spiritual equivalent of a hair shirt – otherwise known as ‘almost naked’. Presumably so that when their shoes pitch them into the nearest gutter, legs akimbo, designer handbags somersaulting through the air, their humiliation will be complete and the fashion god of consumer mentalness will be sated for ever amen – or until the following night.

Sadly there are many who fail, they fall by the wayside (both metaphorically and in contradiction to what I’ve just said!) and let down their fellow martyrs. These can be seen creeping along the streets of towns and cities at about 9.30 p.m. HOLDING their shoes and walking in their BARE FEET. I’m too ashamed for them to go on.

But the shoe martyrs pale into insignificance against the fast food fundamentalists. These much quieter, less gregarious but even more dedicated characters are – in my view – more suited to martyrdom and the noble silence and sombreness with which we historically picture such individuals. They can be viewed any day of the week at any time through the windows of the burger/chicken/general-eyelid & offal-fried-in-fat outlets where the faithful worship. They subject themselves to the misery of eating shit so quietly, with such glum faces and slack-jawed, dull-eyed passivity, lack of conversation, animation or any other sign of enjoyment that they would make Joan of Arc blush.

Unbelievable as some readers may find it – and I forgive those who read my blog and conclude that I bear false witness – I have seen, double martyrdom. NO, you shriek in ecstatic horror. Could a mere mortal truly assume such a mantle even for the God of Consumerism. But I say unto you now, verily have I seen it with mine own eyes – a person both wearing the hoof shoe and eating salted, fat-saturated, compressed bio-waste in a bread bun.

Before you dismiss this claim, bear in mind that world economic growth is largely based on people buying crap they don’t need and didn’t want until the advertisers convinced  them they’d be less than nobody if they didn’t’ have it. It is, I suppose, just possible that these are not martyrs but mass, brainwashed consumer fodder.

But no – that would be too ridiculous and nightmarish!

Next week

My One Night Stand with the Ghost of Bill Farrell.

Concretized!

‘Concretized’ by New York Literary Agency

Like a friendless lottery winner or Pinocchio or Katie Holmes, I learnt the hard way to – ‘be careful what you wish for.’

After five years bashing the keyboard in a lonely why-am-I-doing-this delirium, I landed contracts for two completed novels with a New York agency. I was able to read,

          “…we love your work. It translates brilliantly to both U.S and U.K audiences   and should have great international appeal.”

                                                Rights Unlimited - Thursday Sept 1^st 2005

Having eaten my quota of bitter tasting rejections, I was not willing to believe that this was just the guff they must send out when trying to get an author on the contractual hook. My favourite reject letter was one closely typed, filling two sheets of A4, from a U.K agent, explaining how busy they were!

For weeks I found it hard to utter a sentence which did not bump over the phrase “…my New York agent…” even though New York is a place I only know from Bruce Willis movies.

In a world where bankers think they are the point of commerce and supermarkets crack the whip over food producers; where insurance companies stand between you and your healer – in other words where the middle men have become pre-eminent – why did I think I would be treated even with civility? Bankers and supermarkets may get between you and your life but agencies get between an artist and their soul. The meanest of them can blot out the sun.

Between contact and contract I was treated like a princess. For two months post contract I was treated like the bastard offspring of minor dignitary who needed to be kept sweet. Lists were changed round during Winter 2005/06 and I was put with a slippery, fishy guy. This whiny individual could not pronounce my name without sounding like someone stuck a pin in his bum on the last syllable. From then on I was treated like the leprous peasant that no one would even kick because the effort was too great.

The twelve months in contact and contract with this agency has been the only year since I started regarding myself as a writer where I achieved and created nothing.

All antennae should have been twitching when Mr. Pin-in-arse announced he wanted to “concretize” our relationship. I should have responded,

“You want to solidify our new acquaintance in a toxic restrictive immovable grey substance that would cause any vibrant organic creative living thing to suffocate, sink and die?”

Instead I said,

“Is that a real word?”

Waiting not hours or days but weeks for a simple e-mail response I would then crucify myself doing re-writes that in turn went unacknowledged for further weeks. After a demoralising, debilitating, depressing wasted year I serendipitously encountered Kitty Fitzgerald, U.K author, playwright and publisher who’d had an identical experience. She walked away. After a brief but violent internal conflict I did too.

The immediate result was that I was able to write again, the books listed down the right hand column of my blog plus dozens of poems. Though I am shy about my page poetry and they generally don’t see the light of day, one does appear in the 2012 Winners Anthology of the International Bridport Poetry Prize. My performance poetry I regularly perform up and down the country in varied venues from theatres to comedy clubs and also at the last three Edinburgh Fringe Festivals. And now I have a blog – my weekly word cream cake. The income is patchy but I am no longer CONCRETIZED.

*

And so to the blog flog – available in traditional format or as an e-book,

The Companion Contract

(go to My Books - right hand column of blog - click on the Amazon link)

Sample -

Chpt. 1.

No V.A.T.

‘I sold my accidentally preserved virginity at seventeen to senior equity partner Robert Avery.  The arrangement was made by my disabled neighbour’s divorced daughter’s gay hair stylist’s boss - Richard Le Bon; Ricki to his mates.  Even in Ricki’s indiscriminate world, there were no other young female heterosexuals in the market for such a deal.  His flat fee for arranging the transaction was a mere £700.  If you work out the hours he’d spent developing the idea, co-ordinating meetings and sorting things out, it was a lot less per hour than solicitor’s fees. There was no V.A.T.’

That was the way Jennifer remembered it.

Next week’s blog may be entitled

Martyrs Are Better Dead.

or not.

And hopefully someone who knows about the horrors of IT will have helped me fix the profile box by then. I dunno what I did to it but it broke.

Amanda’s Royal Rejection by Richard Maidley...

Amanda’s Royal Rejection by Richard Maidley

on the Chris Evan’s show – SHOCK REVELATION!

Only now can my bleaders (blogreaders) judge for themselves whether my topless poetry deserved to be suppressed by Stepfordian celebrity presenter Richard Maidley on BBC Radio 2.

(Only now because I didn’t have a blog then)

While standing in for irresponsibly absent Radio 2 D.J. Chris Evans in April last year, Richard Maidely suffered a mad fit of artistic zeal. Mr Judy put out a call for creativity of a poetic nature to celebrate the impending nuptials of Willandkate. Bleaders may note that there was no such call in relation to sporty royal later in the year!

Friends who listen to Radio 2 (I’m not judgemental) sent off a four-liner of mine, hardly even a poem just a little itty bitty ditty. Time elapsed as it has a habit of doing and I was accosted in the local library. Had I left my memory stick in the computer again? No. Had they located the DVD of the Japanese version of Macbeth (Throne of Blood)? No. Hey ho. Had hordes of righteously indignant salt-of-the-earth types stormed the building with the literary equivalent of pitchforks demanding that the library authorities stock multiple copies of my books? Strangely - no. The librarian had heard my name in reference to the call for royal nuptial verse. My name and location had been referred to by a giggling Maidley who declared that he liked the poem (high praise indeed!) and found it very funny. He may have said it was the best thing he’d ever read bar nothing or that could also just be in my fantasies. However – and this is the part bleaders may find shocking – he would not, could not read it out on air. WHY? I hear you cry / blog / tweet (actually I’ve never seen a tweet) / e-mail / facebook / carrier pigeon / smoke signal…

Why indeed!

To this day no plausible explanation has been forthcoming. The short piece did not contain sex or violence. O.K. it mentions sex but there is no violence. There is absolutely no bad language. There is no horror or gore or sustained threat. There are no disturbing images – well maybe one. It’s definitely no more than a P.G.

I most humbly lay the piece before my bleaders now. Like me, the piece is without a title. It had one but I didn’t like it so it was decapitated. Here is the body of the piece.

When royals have sex we pay

In deference to the constitution

What an ingenious genteel form

Of privilege prostitution

Next week’s blog will be a blog flog,

“…she sold her accidentally preserved virginity…”

Please Get a Bigger T.V.

I walked past a house window last week that was filled with a television screen. Probably the T.V. was on the far wall but the quality of modern domestic electric equipment is such that if the T.V. was just a tad larger and turned up fully I could sit on the wall opposite this house and watch it. Then for maybe 10 minutes every month, I would get a free reminder of why I’ve not reverted to telly in 12 years.

Everything is getting SO BIG – like the wheelie suitcases – the ones the size of coffins that are the scourge of railway stations. I’ve never asked but something tells me the people trundling these behemoths behind them, are not actually leaving home for the decade that the size of their luggage suggests.

Once on the train these passengers cannot be parted from their caskets-on-wheels so the rest of us are now investing in mountaineering gear and abseiling paraphernalia in order to get to the loo. WHAT THE HELL IS IN THEM? I didn’t know hair straighteners got that big…

Sorry – back to televisions.

According to Donny Osmond - and he should know - there are 76 million comments about T.V. on social media each week – made while the programmes are airing. He didn’t say who counted. However, what this means is that some people – quite a lot of people – can sit in the presence of these monstrosities and still have brain function enough to connect nerve activity to thumb movement. Now that’s impressive.

Programming and general content, format, style has altered so much in the last dozen years that I have developed Z.T.T (zero telly tolerance). If you don’t believe me, try this little experiment. Keep away from television for a year or even six months then try sitting through a soap opera or a reality T.V. show and see if your insides don’t rupture.

At a friend’s house I was exposed to 3 minutes of X Factor and found myself pressed into the back of the sofa as my whole being revolted against it. Any longer and I think green smoke would have erupted from my nose and ears. I also had the experience of T.V. ‘possession’. Several months ago I viewed Come Dine With Me at my mum’s. Some mad bitch who looked like me, sounded like me and moved like me started uttering comments like,

“That’s the third chicken dish for heaven’s sake…”

“Well… if that’s her idea of an appropriate pudding to serve after risotto!”

“Tut, tut, tut, cold plates!”

I don’t get it - with the exception of  bid T.V. and other shopping shit, which I would highly recommend for the sheer unadulterated comedy value, no seriously – bid T.V. is funnier than any comedy act I’ve seen in recent years, guaranteed to have you – or at least me – rolling off the sofa gasping for breath and screaming for more.

I’ve no scientific basis for what I am about to say but I’ll say it anyway – I’m like that. Staring at the space behind the T.V. for half an hour each day would be more likely to add something to most people’s lives than the (average) 37 hours per week T.V. viewing that people apparently do. The bigger and more domineering the set, the harder it must be for any other sensory intrusion, positive or negative. The ridiculous number of home-improvement shows in the scheduling is surely ironic. Frankly, once a T.V. set reaches a certain size, I’d challenge anyone to notice if the remaining walls were smeared with camel dung.

Last Saturday I spent half an evening at the Star & Shadow in Newcastle, a fab indie venue – with wild, wonderful drummers, a frantic fabulous guitarist, and comedy Marge (!). I then dashed over to Jibba Jabba open mic at The Trent (making the most of a rare Saturday night out). Here, though I didn’t catch it all, there was improvisation, comedy, singer/songwriter music, poetry, and sketch monologue. The showcase performer of the night was a Yorkshire based poet, erudite, interesting, delicious to listen to (even with a hint of a brummie accent!). Not everything would be everyone’s cuppa. Some of the experimental stuff verged on chaotic but the least of it, the most inexperienced performer, the most nervous act, the rawest newcomer was worth a night in front of X Factor any day of the week and this was just one small indie venue on one night in one city.

There is so much creativity out there and telly is so all-consuming, how come the two keep missing each other?

My nightmare scenario is that one day I am on a train and someone with one of those trolleys takes out a monster T.V. plugs it into the carriage socket and I’m blasted into a parallel universe by Strictly Come Dine With Coronation Factor On Ice.

Mistaken for Jordan AGAIN!

Amanda Baker, Comedy Performance Poet says she’s dazed and confused (no change there then) as another mix-up occurs.

Ms Baker’s conflicted personal identity can be clearly demonstrated by the fact that, in just one life time, she met with Nelson Mandela (Glasgow October 1993) but also deliberately obtained Aled Jones’ autograph (Morpeth April  2012). Amanda met Nelson Mandela when he toured Britain after his release. She was then a member of Newcastle City Council Race Equality sub-committee. It was a sub-committee of the main committee - Generally-Don’t-Be-an-Arse. There IS no explanation for the autograph. She is currently the subject of an X-file. Scully and Mulder believe Ms Baker to be the genetically spliced offspring of Desmond Dekker, Pam Ayres and a fried egg sandwich.

Courageously putting aside her personal challenges, Amanda will be performing at the Star & Shadow (Stepney Bank Byker, Newcastle) this Saturday 15^th Sept as part of the evening’s entertainment following the N.E. Feminist Gathering events. Don’t worry, she will only be doing a 15 minute set and there is other good stuff on…

To celebrate the N.E.F.G event Amanda hopes to be outing a new comedy piece ‘Magazine Misery’

                                                                                     

If I get my PC back from the morgue - Next week’s blog may be entitled

Please Get a Bigger T.V.

and when I found out how this blog thing actually works I hope to make it more interactive...

Dinosaurs Cured my Performance Angst – it’s true!

Inconsequentiality can be strangely uplifting. I put it to you with the greatest respect that a grasp of personal insignificance may be liberating. More than that, it could be the answer to those whose ludicrous self confidence went down the pan with their random youth. Are you someone who finds yourself gripped by the urge to express yourself creatively but discovers you are not fortified with an ego that would make Attila the Hun seem shy?  Appreciating the utter unimportance of your existence, the sheer nothingness of yourself, the absolute no-point-to-you essence of who/what you are may be the answer. No really - hear me out.

I have form when it comes to cringe-worthy scenarios. I am no stranger to please-let-the-ground-swallow-me-up situations. Having made a total arse of myself on more occasions than I care to mention (and I won’t catalogue them all as this is a blog not a thesis) I feel that my theorem deserves a hearing. For the sake of intellectual rigor – and not just to make you smirk – here are a few examples.

Earlier this year I fell on my face at Northern Stage in Newcastle at a high profile event called ‘Meet the Promoters’. Desperate-for-a-gig critters like me were given 3 minutes to impress a setting full of the key holders to most of the decent venues in the N.E. Mounting the stage from the front meant that as I tumbled forwards – not only did I suffer the ignominy of making it clear I couldn’t get on a stage gracefully – I had my rear end to the audience at quite close quarters. I gave national literary treasure, Harold Pinter, a new first name at The Lamplight Arts Centre in front of people who would notice his first name isn’t Allan. I’ve had to excuse myself mid performance when a programme was running late as I was about to miss the last bus home and I didn’t have taxi fare. In 2010 on the Saturday before the elections, I was walking through Alnwick prior to performing on the experimental People’s Plinth. At a BNP stall were three individuals dressed to resemble humans so obviously I said a few words to them as I passed. Standing on the plinth in the cold, wet, almost empty market place I realised that they were in my line of vision – they were in effect – my audience! In a hotel in Morpeth I once took part in a surreal performance in the round with some Folk types (and they are weirder than poets) while small muscle-bound men in tiny lycra knickers and makeup wandered through the performance area. There was a wrestling match taking place in the adjacent room to raucous applause. I’ve fumbled lines, forgotten lines, muddled characters, realised after leaving the stage that something about my person wasn’t where it should have been. It’s really quite an extensive list but I’ll stop there. The thing is IT DOESN’T MATTER and I learnt this from dinosaurs.

The first dinosaurs were around during the Triassic period when the earth was a single land mass, Pangaea – 220 million years ago. Coelophysis was one of those early ones. So let’s just say that there was a coelophysis who got the urge to scamper about in a meaningful way for her own creative elevation and to entertain other Triassic weirdies. We wont call it dancing because this is an analogy not sentimental anthropomorphism… so anyway – the coelophysis – lets call her Annie – is put off her prancing because she worries she’ll fall or make a Triassic twit of herself by drooling at the wrong moment or rushing off suddenly, mid prance, to claim her share of some nearby carrion or she gets cross with some dung beetles then finds out they are her audience. So she decides it’s all too much and doesn’t do her thing any more. But what is the worst that can happen? And if it does happen – so what? Annie is not only dead she is extinct. The dinosaurs who knew her are dead and extinct as are the dinosaurs who knew them. She doesn’t even exist as a genetic memory. Her lot were succeeded by the dinosaurs of the Jurassic and they were replaced by the leathery bods of the Cretaceous. And you know what – they are all dead and extinct and have been for the past 65 million years. So ok – if you want to hijack my analogy you may conclude, what is the point of anything. But you are just being silly and Nihilistic. Dinosaurs were around for unimaginable lengths of time and even they weren’t the first creatures on our planet. They are not around now because a bit of rock bumped into the earth - apparently. We’ve been around for a measly few thousand years and – let’s face it – we are actively and effectively working towards our own destruction. As a species we are unlikely to enjoy dino-longevity. So – I suppose what I am saying is – if you want to do it get on with it and don’t be held back by any sense that it matters.